Thomas Wolfe, page 430
Sometimes that spring, I would leave the city, going away just for the sheer joy I felt in coming back to it. I would go out in the country and come back at the end of day; or at the week-end, when I had no class to teach at the university where I was employed as an instructor, I would go away to other places where I had known people, or where I had once lived. I would go to Baltimore, to Washington, into Virginia, to New England, or among my father’s people in a country town near Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania.
One Saturday, on one of those instant and overwhelming impulses, I went to the station, and got on a train that was going south into the State where I was born. This journey was never completed: I left the train that night at a station in Virginia, caught another train bound north, and was back in the city again the next afternoon. But on the trip into the South an incident occurred which I could not forget, and which became as much a part of my whole memory of the city as everything I saw that year.
It was this: that afternoon about three o’clock, as the train was pounding south across New Jersey, another train upon the inside track began to race with us, and for a distance of ten miles the two trains thundered down the tracks in an even, thrilling, and tremendous contest of steel and smoke and pistoned wheel that blotted out everything, the vision of the earth, the thought of the journey, the memory of the city, for every one who saw it.
The other train, which was bound for Philadelphia, appeared so calmly and naturally that at first no one suspected that a race was on. It came banging up slowly, its big black snout swaying and bucking with a clumsy movement, as it came on, its shining pistons swinging free and loose, and with short intermittent blasts of smoke from its squat funnel. It came up so slowly and naturally, past our windows, that at first it was hard to understand at what terrific speed the train was running, until one looked out of the windows on the other side and saw the flat, formless and uncharactered earth of New Jersey whipping by like pickets on a fence.
The other train came slowly on with that huge banging movement of the terrific locomotive, eating its way up past our windows, until the engine cab was level with me and I could see across two or three scant feet of space and see the engineer. He was a young man cleanly jacketed in striped blue and wearing goggles. He had a ruddy color, and his strong, pleasant face, which bore on it the character of courage, dignity, and an immense and expert knowledge these men have, was set in a good-natured and determined grin, as with one gloved hand held steady on the throttle, he leaned upon his sill, with every energy and perception in him fixed with a focal concentration on the rails. Behind him his fireman, balanced on the swaying floor, his face black and grinning, his eyes goggled like a demon and lit by the savage flare of his terrific furnace, was shoveling coal with all his might. Meanwhile, the train came on, came on, eating its way past foot by foot until the engine cab disappeared from sight, and the first coaches of the train came by.
And now a wonderful thing occurred. As the heavy rust-red coaches of the other train came up and began to pass us, the passengers of both trains suddenly became aware that a race between the trains was taking place. A tremendous excitement surged up in them, working its instant magic on all these travelers, with their gray hats, their worn gray city faces, and their dull tired eyes, which just the moment before had been fastened dully and wearily on the pages of a newspaper, as if, having been hurled along this way beneath the lonely skies so many times, the desolate face of the earth had long since grown too familiar to them, and they never looked out the windows any more.
But now the faces that had been so gray and dead were flushed with color, the dull and lusterless eyes had begun to burn with joy and interest. The passengers of both trains crowded to the windows, grinning like children for delight and jubilation.
Meanwhile, our own train, which for a space had been holding its rival even, now began to fall behind. The other train began to slide past our windows with increasing speed, and when this happened the joy and triumph of its passengers were almost unbelievable. Meanwhile, our faces had turned black and bitter with defeat. We cursed, we muttered, we scowled malevolently at them, and turned away with an appearance of indifference, as if we had no further interest in the thing, only to come back again with a fascinated and bitter look as their accursed windows slid by us with the inevitability of death and destiny.
Meanwhile, the crews of the two trains had shown as keen and passionate an interest, as intense a rivalry, as had the passengers. The conductors and porters were clustered at the windows or against the door in the car-ends, and they grinned and jeered just as the rest of us had done; but their interest was more professional, their knowledge more intimate and exact. The conductor would say to the porter—“Whose train is that? Did you see John McIntyre aboard?” And the Negro would answer positively, “No, sah! Dat ain’t Cap’n McIntyre. Old man Rigsby’s got her. Dere he is now!” he cried, as another coach moved past, and the grizzled and grinning face of an old conductor came in sight.
Then the conductor would go away, shaking his head, and the Negro would mutter and chuckle to himself by turns. He was a fat and enormous darkey, with an ink-black skin, a huge broad bottom, teeth of solid grinning white, and with a big fatty growth on the back of his thick neck. He shook like jelly when he laughed. I had known him for years because he came from my native town, and the Pullman car in which I rode, which was known as K 19, was the car that always made the journey of seven hundred miles between my home town and the city. Now the Negro sprawled upon the green upholstery of the end seat in the Pullman and grinned and muttered at his fellows in the other train.
“All right, boy. All right, you ole slew-footed niggah!” he would growl at a grinning darkey in the other train. “Uh! Uh!” he would grunt ironically. “Don’t you think you’s somp’n dough! You’s pullin’ dat train by yo’self, you is!” he would laugh sarcastically, and then suddenly and impatiently conclude, “Go on, boy! Go on! I sees you! I don’t care how soon I loses you! Go on, niggah! Go on! Git dat ugly ole livah-lipped face of yo’n out o’ my way!”
And the grinning and derisive face would also vanish and be gone, until the whole train had passed us, and vanished from our sight. And our porter sat there staring out the window, chuckling and shaking his head from time to time, as he said to himself, with a tone of reproof and disbelief:
“Dey ain’t got no right to do dat! Dey ain’t got no right to run right by us like we wasn’t here!” he chuckled. “Dey ain’t nothin’ but a little ole Philadelphia local! Dey’re not supposed to make the time we is! We’s de limited! We got de outside rail!” he bragged, but immediately shaking his head, he said: “But Lawd, Lawd! Dat didn’t help us none today. Dey’ve gone right on by us! We’ll never ketch dem now!” he said mournfully, and it seemed that he was right.
Our train was running in free light and open country now, and the passengers, resigned finally to defeat, had settled back into their former dozing apathy. But suddenly our train seemed to start and leap below us with a living energy, its speed increasing visibly, the earth began to rush by with an ever-faster stroke, the passengers looked up and at one another with a question in their eyes, and an awakened interest.
And now our fortune was reversed, our train was running through the country at terrific speed, and in a moment more we began to come up on the rival train again. And now, just as the other train had slid by us, we began to walk by its windows with the calm imperious stride of our awakened and irresistible power. But where, before, the passengers of both trains had mocked and jeered at one another, they now smiled quietly and good-naturedly, with a friendly, almost affectionate, interest. For it seemed that they—the people in the other train—now felt that their train had done its best and made a manful showing against its mighty and distinguished competitor, and that they were now cheerfully resigned to let the limited have its way.
And now we walked up past the windows of the dining-car: we could see the smiling white-jacketed waiters, the tables covered with their snowy white and heavy gleaming silver, and the people eating, smiling and looking toward us in a friendly manner as they ate. And then we were abreast the heavy parlor cars: a lovely girl, blonde haired, with a red silk dress, and slender shapely legs crossed carelessly, holding an opened magazine face downward in one hand, and with the slender tapering fingers of the other hand curved inward toward her belly where they fumbled with a charm or locket hanging from a chain, was looking at us for a moment with a tender and good-natured smile. And opposite her, with his chair turned toward her, an old man, dressed elegantly in a thin, finely woven, and expensive-looking suit of gray, and with a meager, weary, and distinguished face, that had brown spots upon it, was sitting with his thin phthisic shanks crossed, and for a moment I could see his lean hands, palsied, stiff, and folded on his lap, with brown spots on them; and I could see a stiff, corded, brittle-looking vein upon the back of one old hand.
And outside there was raw and desolate-looking country, bursting suddenly into flares of April—a tree in bloom, a patch of grass, a light of flowers—incredible, unutterable, savage, immense, and delicate. And outside there were the great steel coaches, the terrific locomotives, the shining rails, the sweep of the tracks, the vast indifferent dinginess and rust of colors, the powerful mechanical expertness, and the huge indifference to suave finish. And inside there were the opulent green and luxury of the Pullman cars, the soft glow of the lights, and the people fixed there for an instant in incomparably rich and vivid little pictures of their life and destiny, as we were all hurled onward, a thousand atoms, to our journey’s end somewhere upon the mighty continent, across the immense and lonely visage of the everlasting earth.
And we looked at one another for a moment, we passed and vanished and were gone forever, yet it seemed to me that I had known these people, that I knew them better than the people in my own train, and that, having met them for an instant under immense and timeless skies as we were hurled across the continent to a thousand destinations, we had met, passed, vanished, yet would remember this forever. And I think the people in the two trains felt this, also: slowly we rode past them now, and our mouths smiled and our eyes were friendly, but I think there was some sorrow and regret in what we felt. For, having lived together as strangers in the immense and swarming city, we now had met upon the everlasting earth, hurled past each other for a moment between two points in time upon the shining rails, never to meet, to speak, to know each other any more, and the briefness of our days, the destiny of man, was in that instant greeting and farewell.
Therefore, in this way, we passed and vanished, the coaches slipped away from us until again we came up level with the high cab of the locomotive. And now the young engineer no longer sat in his high window with a determined grin and with his hard blue eyes fixed on the rail. Rather, he stood now in the door, his engine banging away deliberately, slowed down, bucking and rocking loosely as we passed. His attitude was that of a man who has just given up a race. He had just turned to shout something to his fireman, who stood there balanced, arms akimbo, black and grinning, as we moved up by them. The engineer had one gloved hand thrust out against the cab to support him, he held the other on his hip, and he was grinning broadly at us with solid teeth edged with one molar of bright gold—a fine, free, generous, and good-humored smile, which said more plain than any words could do: “Well, it’s over now! You fellows win! But you’ll have to admit we gave you a run for your money while it lasted!”
Then we drew away and lost the train forever. And presently our own train came in to Trenton, where it stopped. And suddenly, as I was looking at some Negroes working there with picks and shovels on the track beside the train, one looked up and spoke quietly to our fat porter, without surprise or any greeting, as casually and naturally as a man could speak to some one who has been in the same room with him for hours.
“When you comin’ back dis way, boy?” he said.
“I’ll be comin’ back again on Tuesday,” said our porter.
“Did you see dat ole long gal yet? Did you tell huh what I said?”
“Not yet,” the porter said, “but I’ll be seein’ huh fo’ long! I’ll tell yo what she says.”
“I’ll be lookin’ fo’ you,” said the other Negro.
“Don’t fo’git now,” said our fat black porter, chuckling; and the train started, the man calmly returned to his work again; and this was all. What that astounding meeting of two black atoms underneath the skies, that casual, incredible conversation meant, I never knew; but I did not forget it.
And the whole memory of this journey, of this race between the trains, of the Negroes, of the passengers who came to life like magic, crowding and laughing at the windows, and particularly of the girl and the vein upon the old man’s hand, was fixed in my brain forever. And like everything I did or saw that year, like every journey that I made, it became part of my whole memory of the city.
And the city would always be the same when I came back. I would rush through the immense and glorious stations, murmurous with their million destinies and the everlasting sound of time, that was caught up forever in their roof—I would rush out into the street, and instantly it would be the same as it had always been, and yet forever strange and new.
I felt as if by being gone from it an instant I had missed something priceless and irrecoverable. I felt instantly that nothing had changed a bit, and yet it was changing furiously, every second before my eyes. It seemed stranger than a dream, and more familiar than my mother’s face. I could not believe in it—and I could not believe in anything else on earth. I hated it, I loved it, I was instantly engulfed and overwhelmed by it, and yet I thought at once that I could eat and drink it all, devour it, have it in me. It filled me with an intolerable joy and pain, an unutterable feeling of triumph and sorrow, a belief that all of it was mine, and a knowledge that I could never own or keep even a handful of its dust.
I brought back to it the whole packed glory of the earth, the splendor, power, and beauty of the nation. I brought back to it a tremendous memory of space, and power, and of exultant distances; a vision of trains that smashed and pounded at the rails, a memory of people hurled past the window of my vision in another train, of people eating sumptuously from gleaming silver in the dining cars, of cities waking in the first light of morning, and of a thousand little sleeping towns built across the land, lonely and small and silent in the night, huddled below the desolation of immense and cruel skies.
I brought to it the memory of the loaded box-cars slatting past at fifty miles an hour, of swift breaks like openings in a wall when coal cars came between, and the sudden feeling of release and freedom when the last caboose whipped past. I remembered the dull rusty red, like dried blood, of the freight cars, the lettering on them, and their huge gaping emptiness and joy as they curved in among raw piney land upon a rusty track, waiting for great destinies in the old red light of evening upon the lonely, savage, and indifferent earth; and I remembered the cindery look of road-beds, and the raw and barren spaces in the land that ended nowhere; the red clay of railway cuts, and the small hard lights of semaphores—green red and yellow—as in the heart of the enormous dark they shone for great trains smashing at their rails their small and passionate assurances.
And somehow all these things would awaken intolerably the blazing images of all the other things which I had seen and known in my childhood in a little town, when the great vision of the shining city was living already in my mind, and was somehow legible, exultant, full of joy and menace in ten thousand fleeting things, in the tremendous pageantry of childhood. And in all I saw, felt, tasted, smelled, or heard then—in the odor of tar in April, and the smell of smoke in late October; in cloud shadows passing on the massed green of a hill and in the tugging of a leaf upon a bough; in the face of an actor from the city as he walked cockily down the main street of the town; and in the smell of sawdust and of circuses; and of elephants coming from the cars in morning darkness, and the smells of coffee, steaks, and ham in the circus breakfast-tent; of old worn planking in a small-town baseball bleachers, and the strident voices of a barker in a carnival; in the smell of powder, confetti, gasoline, and hot dogs, and in the sad wheeling music of a carousel; and in the flame-flares of great trains pounding at the river’s edge; in the smell of rivers, fresh, half-rotten; and in the cool rustling of bladed corn at night; in walnut pulp, and rotting leaves, and in the mellow winey smell of binned and cellared apples; in the voice of a traveler who had come back from the city; and in the face of a woman who had lived there; in the drowsy warmth and smell and apathy of a little country station in mid-afternoon, sparking through brooding air the electric thrill of ticking telegraphs, and the oncoming menace of the train; in pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge with its soaring web of cables, and of men with derby hats who walked across it; and in the memory of the songs we sang—in haunting memories—of “Alexander’s Rag Time Band,” “Has anybody here seen Kelly?” and “Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay”; and of wintry streets where the bare boughs swung in corner light; and of closed houses, drawn shades, warmly golden with the lights and fires, and thumped pianos and the sound of voices singing; and in church bells tolling through a countryside at night; and in the departing whistle-wail of trains; the scamper of leaves upon a street in autumn; and of a woman’s burst of laughter in the summer dark; in the great slow yellow rivers, and the broad and lonely light of winter across the land, and in a thousand images of the embrowned, desolate, and wintry earth—in these and in ten thousand other things I had seen and dreamed as a child; and now they all came back to me.
And finally I brought back to it the heart, the eye, the vision, of the everlasting stranger, who had walked its stones, and breathed its air, and looked into its million dark and riven faces as a stranger, and who could never make the city’s life his own.
I brought back to it the million memories of my fathers, who were great men and knew the wilderness, but who had never lived in cities: three hundred of my blood and bone who sowed their blood and sperm across the continent, walked beneath its broad and lonely lights, were frozen by its bitter cold, burned by the heat of its fierce suns, withered, gnarled, and broken by its savage weathers, and who fought like lions with its gigantic strength, its wildness, its limitless savagery and beauty until with one stroke of its paw it broke their backs and killed them.
